Notices by Kevin Marks (kevinmarks@xoxo.zone)

@jwildeboer I expect the summary to be in the summary field and the content to be in the content field, which is why I hate RSS that puts either in the description field.

@jwildeboer also mastodon that treats the summary field as a content warning, subverting the entire point of standardising this in Activity Streams in the first place and preserving that in Activity Pub 12 years later

Key findings:
45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.
Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/new-ebu-research-ai-assistants-news-content

“We've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news. This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponized existing incompetence.
[…]
We've created a perfect storm: tools that amplify incompetence, used by developers who can't evaluate the output, reviewed by managers who trust the machine more than their people.”
https://techtrenches.substack.com/p/the-great-software-quality-collapse

@aeva @zip pavement

@ranjit @skinnylatte I loved the Yemeni coffee in Brooklyn last visit https://share.google/ivTLHpbTFdNuXhmxU

@ariaflame @Kensan @shortridge the other challenge with being back in the UK is that half the year UTC and local time are the same.
Oh, and being near 0 longitude..

@hugovk @Kensan @shortridge https://dateutil.readthedocs.io/en/stable/parser.html see the dayfirst and yearfirst settings docs

@Kensan @shortridge this reminds me of the "python only parses dates correctly after the 12th of the month" problem I had. (The dates in the files I was being sent had been changed to UK dd/mm/YYYY format. Python assumes mm/dd/YYYY unless the mm>12)

@Nickiquote @halfempty You know, I think what he is really building is the copy of the Total Perspective Vortex in Zarniwoop's pocket universe that is only there to serve his ego.

@halfempty @Nickiquote exactly. If you were doing a Heinlein reference you'd call it Mycroft (from Moon is a Harsh Mistress) or Minerva (from Time Enough For Love). But Musk is basically Vroomfondel, making money on the chatshow circuit predicting what AI will do.

@ByrdNick indeed, I've been saying this for a while now (I'm not a neurologist though) https://www.kevinmarks.com/confabulation.html

@dymaxion @Tarah @quinn sounds about right, I have a cite from 2012

@lmorchard @evan the bsky one that works is a browser extension, so that is a viable technique until people end their twitter accounts. You could also the following.js in the Twitter export, but that's uids, so you'd need a name cache somewhere.

@mmasnick @quinn @riana @danmcd @alecm @normative I read this as "nerd herder" in the first post and thought it was a very different concept, and it also made me think of Carrie Fisher

@thisismissem @pfefferle @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan @samsethi did this change in a recent Mastodon version? Have client apps caught up with it?

Maybe Google shouldn't strip non-ascii characters when training AI

Suggestion for @phanpy
Threads web has a nice affordance where people you don't follow have a little plus sign in that you can click to follow them. It turns into a tick when you do. (The tick is only in the immediate post-follow context, normally people you follow are unbadged)

@evan it was a lot easier to pitch PubSubHubbub than WebSub

“I’m seeing a revival now,” said Levels, regarding PHP. “People are getting sick of frameworks. All the JavaScript frameworks are so… what do you call it, like [un]wieldy. It takes so much work to just maintain this code, and then it updates to a new version, you need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works.” https://thenewstack.io/developers-rail-against-javascript-merchants-of-complexity/